The subtitle of Luca Frei’s Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there.” – a citation from writer and artist Kodwo Eshun – is a rallying call, an invitation to intellectual and aesthetic experimentation superimposed upon a bleak black-and-white image of Place Beaubourg in Paris, the site of the Centre Pompidou before the museum was built. The photograph depicts the area when it was still a vast car park, already severed from its historic past, from above. Frei’s work is charged with a melancholy suggested by a temporal slippage between image and text: It affirms and condemns the bald optimism and ideological values of this cultural centre dialectically both as an idea and as a reality. (David Bussel)